Teller will make magic at South Coast Rep

South Coast Repertory’s 2014-15 season, to be announced Tuesday, includes some of American and British theater’s current trendsetters and most successful companies. There will be five world premieres and three productions of plays that were seen as readings at this year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, SCR’s annual presentation of new work.

Highlights include “Tristan & Yseult” by Kneehigh Theatre, an innovative U.K. company whose imaginative version of “Brief Encounter” was a hot ticket this year at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by Teller (of Penn & Teller) and veteran director Aaron Posner; and three works that were seen in readings at the Pacific Playwrights Festival in April: Theresa Rebeck’s “Zealot,” Melissa Ross’ “Of Good Stock” and Rajiv Joseph’s “Mr. Wolf.”

“The Tempest,” co-produced by SCR and one of the nation’s most successful regional companies, Massachusetts’ American Repertory Theatre, has already proved popular in Boston and Las Vegas. “It has broken box office records in both places,” said Marc Masterson, SCR’s artistic director.

Masterson is a fan of ART’s artistic director, Diane Paulus, who has succeeded on Broadway and elsewhere in the past few years. “She is brilliant and thinks outside the conventional structures of regional theater. And she knows how to create work that transfers successfully to Broadway.” ART’s production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” is currently playing at the Ahmanson Theatre.

“Mr. Wolf” is an SCR commission. “About 500 people came to the reading at PPF, which was very powerful,” Masterson said. Joseph’s playwriting career took off when his “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” (2009) was a Pulitzer finalist and went to Broadway.

Masterson is particularly excited about Kneehigh’s “Tristan,” based on a medieval myth about an adulterous affair between a Cornish knight and an Irish princess. “I’ve been communicating with them for several years,” Masterson said of Kneehigh, based in Cornwall, U.K., “I love everything I’ve seen of theirs, and I’ve seen a good deal.”

Masterson hopes to bring more foreign companies and productions to SCR. “There is an ongoing interest in finding the best of the world stage and bringing it into our orbit. It’s important to realize that we live in a global culture.”